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Planned vs Reactive Deloads

Method Health
Oct 25, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Sep 9

Every physically active person has or will encounter a period in which external conflicts limit the time available for exercise. Personal conflicts, injury, family commitments, caring for an ill family member, extended travel, or time commitments for personal or business reasons that limit time availability for regular exercise.


Some common questions we receive from clients regarding deload periods:

  • “I am going away on holiday. What can I do to prevent losing all my fitness, muscle, and strength  from exercise?”

  • “Will I lose all my gains if I take a break from exercise?”

  • “What can I do during this injury to minimise aerobic fitness and strength reductions”


Read on to get some insight into ways to manage and maintain your exercise habits during reduced exercise periods.



Overall, If you have been completing consistent weekly exercise training for more than a year, it would take many weeks of doing very little physical activity (e.g., hospital-based bed rest) to reduce previously made progress in aerobic fitness, muscle mass, strength, and power significantly. If you are on a 3-4 week holiday and staying active by walking a lot and occasionally lifting heavy things (like your suitcase), you will likely either maintain all your exercise gains, or it will only take 1-3 weeks of continuing your previous exercise routine to regain what changed during your holiday.


If you do not want to sustain large reductions in your well earnt exercise gains during breaks but can’t train as much as usual, when you do train, make sure your intensity is high, even if the time spent training or weekly frequency is reduced, to maintain your aerobic fitness, muscle, and strength. Complete rest, such as from hospital-based bed rest or injury that results in joint bracing (broken bone or large joint or tendon injury) or non-weight-bearing (wheelchair or crutches), results in more significant reductions and longer periods needed to improve again. However, some form of exercise during these periods while recovering has a significant protective effect of reducing “losses.”


You might think “I’ll take a rest week every 6-8 weeks of strength training, so what is the smallest amount of strength training I need to complete to maintain all my training strength and muscle gains?” Generally, 1-2 weeks of active rest away from the gym will not affect your gym gains https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sms.14739?campaign=woletoc. If life is crazy or mentally you need a break, have one. This can be called a “reactive deload” or a suddenly planned reduction in weekly total exercise volume that mostly offers a psychological break from the stressors of challenging but healthy exercise. Taking a break from monotony or re-establishing a sense of control over lifestyle factors outside of exercise that might affect your sense of recovery from the gym is a good reason to have a deload.


There does not seem to be a predictable benefit from planned deloads, such as thinking, “I’ll take a rest week every 6 weeks of training,” unless you are trying to peak for a competitive performance. We used to believe “super-compensation” occurred after rest from non-sustainable weekly progressive exercise, and rest would allow this super-compensation to be realized. However, all that is occurring is general fatigue that accumulates during non-sustainable progressive weekly exercise, which reduces when we have a rest week, giving the perception that we have gotten stronger, but really, we have only just reduced fatigue that was hiding our ability to express our new adaptations from progressive exercise. If your exercise routine is sustainable and effective at promoting long-term exercise adaptations (fitness, strength, muscle), you should not need planned rest weeks. If your goal is general health or building tje most healthy amounts of aerobic fitness, strength, or muscle, you should not need to plan deloads but an occasional reactive deload is fine and will not harm your long term gains.


Reactive deloads are also helpful in physiotherapy, where a flare-up of a previous injury or new injury reduces current tolerance to normal amounts of exercise. Reducing exercise dosage without stopping everything supports the immune and nervous systems in doing their thing, calming the whole body down before building up tolerance to movement again. As said already, you do not need to be concerned about setbacks from 1-2 weeks of reduced exercise prior to building back up again.


Positively, you only need to do about a third of the previous weekly lifting dosages (or half if you are older) to maintain muscle mass and strength completely  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-021-01490-1  + https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02701367.2022.2070592?journalCode=urqe20 So if you do 10 sets of an exercise a week, being active outside the gym and completing 3 challenging sets (4-5 sets for over 60 year olds) of that strength exercise weekly is sufficient to maintain your gains Exercise dosing to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults - PubMed (nih.gov)


More opinions about planned versus reactive deloads for strength and muscle performance,  see these links:


See our Aerobic or Strength deload articles for more on what to expect when resting from these different exercise modes.


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